No time for sentiment: The hard-headed new Russian approach to sports

Vic Wild joined Team Russia in 2012 and won the gold medal at the Sochi Olympics. Source: Ramil Sitdikov / RIA Novosti

Recent years have seen a broad switch of focus in Russian sport, with many disciplines in which the country was traditionally strong being forsaken for a new emphasis on niche sports. This is the result of Russia’s emphasis on a concerted program of state funding for sports, with Olympic medals the yardstick for success.

One
Russian sports journalist I know had a pithy response
when asked why his publication didn’t feature more coverage of Russian
swimmers’ successes.

“Why
waste time writing about something that doesn’t exist?”

Harsh,
perhaps, but also largely accurate. There certainly wasn’t anything to write
home about last week from the European championships in Berlin, when just one
gold medal meant the worst performance by Russian or Soviet swimmers since
1954.

For
Vladimir Salnikov, head of the Russian Swimming Federation, it was certainly a
far cry from the 1970s and 1980s, when he won four Olympic gold medals. “We’re
absolutely not satisfied with the results. It’s a long way from what we’d
prepared for,” said the man once known as ‘The Monster of the Waves’.

In other
sports too, Russia is falling beind. The country’s result at this month’s
European Athletics Championships in Zurich was its worst ever.

However,
Russian sport as a whole isn’t in freefall. In fact, it’s better funded than
ever. Under the control of the highly influential Sports Ministry, it’s also
probably better organized than at any point since the formidable Soviet sports
machine collapsed.

It’s
really a matter of where the money – and the government attention – is going.
In a country which watches the Olympic medal table more than any other, the
Sports Ministry prioritizes Russia’s total medal haul, and topping the table is
popularly called “winning the Olympics.” The medal race may take place on
paper, but for the Russian government it’s the most important Olympic event of
all. Russia’s first place at February’s Winter Olympics in Sochi was a national
triumph.

As a
result, there’s been a long-term switch of focus from high-profile events to
more niche ones, events that are certainly not easy to win, but where
competition is somewhat less fierce.

While
Russia’s swimmers may have failed to make a splash at the European
championships, the country was crushingly dominant in diving and synchronized
swimming, topping the medal table in both events.

In
athletics, there was a time when Soviet athletes raced – and beat – star
sprinters from the U.S. and Jamaica. At the Seoul 1988 Olympics, famed for its
super-fast (and super-doped) 100 m final, it was the Soviet Union who showed
strength in depth by winning the 4 x 100 m relay. Now the Russian sprinting
tradition is a thing of the past and the best medal hopes are in the
often-overlooked world of race-walking.

In some
sports, Russia has become much stronger, even unbeatable. In synchronized
swimming and rhythmic gymnastics, every single Olympic gold medal this century
has been won by Russia. Meanwhile in other sports, Russia has almost ceased to
exist. The Soviet Union commanded respect on the world’s rowing lakes, but the
modern Russian rowing federation is almost moribund, sometimes literally – for
three years in the last decade, it was officially headed by a dead man.

There are
many reasons for this switch to specialization. In the troubled 1990s, Russia
simply didn’t have the resources to identify and train promising young athletes
in such a wide range of sports. As facilities decayed and coaches aged, they
weren’t replaced and sporting traditions decayed too. It made sense to support
the facilities that still worked.

Russia
also has fewer athletes to choose from. Had they been born after 1991, many
famous names of Soviet sport would not necessarily have been Russian, such as
legendary sprinter Valery Borzov, born in western Ukraine. The economic crisis
of the 1990s is still dogging Russia too. As many studies have shown, childhood
nutrition is key to an athlete’s development, meaning that Russians who starved
as children in the chaotic post-Soviet years face extra barriers to becoming
the world’s best.

The
Russian method, however, focusing on sports that not everyone watches come the Olympics,
does have some real advantages. At the Sochi Winter Olympics, Russia finished
with 13 gold medals, against 11 for second-placed Norway. Two of those Russian
gold medals came from a man who was there purely because of Russia’s love for
unheralded events.

That man
is Washington state native Vic Wild, who competed in snowboard slalom for the
U.S. until 2011, when he married Russian boarder Alyona Zavarzina. In a welcome
twist on the stereotypical relationship between an American man and a Russian
woman, he took a Russian passport and began to compete for Russia. Why? The
U.S. was overlooking his discipline because it wasn’t glamorous enough.

The U.S.
government doesn’t provide funding for sports and there’s no government
planning involved, so individual federations have to go out and attract
sponsors. In the case of U.S. Snowboarding, its sponsors are keenest to be
associated with the glamour of halfpipe, where riders perform flips and twists
in mid-air, than the technical, precise world of slalom.

As a result, most of
the funding generated from the sponsors went to halfpipe riders, while the
entire men’s and women’s slalom programs were reportedly forced to subsist on
just $135,000 a year. In Russia, by contrast, as an Olympic hopeful and later
Olympic champion, Wild has been lavished with cash and even a house.

It all
boils down to two worldviews, two perspectives on the role of the government in
sports. If you think the state should stay out, sponsors will chase
high-profile success. With government stumping up the cash, is it fair to
demand more medals for your rubles?